Conduct
Members are expected to remain civil at all times. We recognise and respect a wide range of viewpoints, but you should not be

Racist, homophobic, trolling or any other disrespectful behaviour to another culture or person - such behaviour is not tolerated in any capacity.

Spamming the forum in any way.

Openly posting spoilers relevant to discussion. That's what

tags are for.
[*] Posting anything that is “not safe for work”. This means pornographic or otherwise unsuitable material is banned. Similarly, crude humour, furry pictures or vulgar behaviour is not allowed.
[*] “Backseat modding”. For example, posting “this will be locked” or similar, which is essentially spam. Report it to a moderator so we can judge it.
[*] Double, triple or any kind of multiple posting - this is generally frowned upon.
[*] Selling your wares. That's what eBay is for!
[*] Making very short posts of one or two words. Timely and relevant posts are okay, but posting single word / emoticons consistently is not contributing anything.

Swearing is allowed, but please do not direct it at another user, and overly excessive language may still be removed at a moderator's discretion. By default the forum has a swear filter turned on - this can be disabled in the User Control Panel.

Avatars and Signatures
To keep forum loading times down and keep the forums looking neat, we have some guidelines for avatar and signature:

Both avatar and signature should reflect all other rules.

Avatars should be kept a reasonable size. (120x80 and under 150KB)

Banners and images in signatures should not exceed 600x100, must be under 200kb and can contain up to one gif animation.

Social media links, including Facebook and Twitter, along with Friend Codes, NNIDs, Gamertags, PSN IDs etc are permitted.

If you want to make an "official" thread, please PM a moderator to get approval for it beforehand. It's not about speed to make it, though - quality is far more important. The more effort put into it, the more likely it is to get officiated.

Using Sonm to promote your own website is discouraged.

Links to external chatrooms, IRC channels etc are now allowed, provided you don't spam them for promotion.

Subforums such as Forum Games and Quizzes and General Nintendo Chat may have board specific rules. They are as binding as these – so pay attention to them!

Any forum projects using the Sonm name, whether hosted externally or on this site, need to follow the forum rules. This means anything that you link to needs to follow our forum rules to be associated with our forum. Feel free to create what you want, but we will remove all links to a project if it breaks these rules.

We reserve the right to change the rules at any time.

Punishments
Punishment on Sonm is handled exclusively by moderators, who will lock topics or delete posts at their discretion. More serious breaks of the rules will usually be handled on a sliding scale, punishments taking the form of one of the following...

Blacklisting - Usually given out for constantly causing problems such as derailing discussion in a specific thread or section.

Warnings - Usually given out for abusive language to others, consistent spamming or ignoring repeated moderator requests.

Suspensions - Usually given out to users who have received multiple warnings and continue to rulebreak, or more extreme cases of rulebreaking. The length will vary depending on the offense, from 30 mins up to 6 months.

Bannings - The final stage. Users who have failed to adhere to the rules following warnings and suspensions, or who have clearly signed up to the forum with malicious intent (including bots and spammers) will be permanently banned.

If you see a rule breaking post, please report it to a moderator by clicking the report ( ) button.